The author of several novels, Atef Abu Saif has been the minister of culture for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank since 2019. He happened to be visiting Gaza when attacks by Hamas were met by weeks of unrelenting Israeli airstrikes. As of this writing, the number of people killed in Gaza has exceeded 10,000, some 4,000 of whom were children. In this diary of life—such as it is—in Gaza since Israel’s violent campaign began, Atef Abu Saif writes of enduring trauma after trauma, day after day. Here, he learns that his wife’s only sister has been killed:
For a long 10 minutes, I cried and cried. Overwhelmed by the horrors of the past few days, I walked out of the hospital and found myself wandering the streets. I thought idly, we could turn this city into a film set for war movies. Second World War films and end-of-the-world movies. We could hire it out to the best Hollywood directors. Doomsday on demand.
Who could have the courage to tell Hanna, so far away in Ramallah, that her only sister had been killed? That her family had been killed? I phoned my colleague Manar and asked her to go to our house with a couple of friends and try to delay the news from getting to her. “Lie to her,” I told Manar. “Say the building was attacked by F-16s but the neighbors think Huda and Hatem were out at the time. Any lie that could help.”
In the morning, I rejoined the search for bodies. The building was, as T.S. Eliot would say, “a heap of broken images.” We searchers picked through the ruins under the cricket-like hum of drones we couldn’t see in the sky.
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As Israel rains hellfire on Gaza, the mainstream media have called on author Saree Makdisi and other Palestinian intellectuals for comment. Makdisi asks, “How can a person make up for seven decades of misrepresentation and willful distortion in the time allotted to a sound bite?” When he and others try, Makdisi explains, the people asking the questions don’t want to hear the answers:
What we are not allowed to say, as Palestinians speaking to the Western media, is that all life is equally valuable. That no event takes place in a vacuum. That history didn’t start on October 7, 2023, and if you place what’s happening in the wider historical context of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, what’s most remarkable is that anyone in 2023 should be still surprised that conditions of absolute violence, domination, suffocation, and control produce appalling violence in turn. During the Haitian revolution in the early 19th century, former slaves massacred white settler men, women, and children. During Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831, insurgent slaves massacred white men, women, and children. During the Indian uprising of 1857, Indian rebels massacred English men, women, and children. During the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, Kenyan rebels massacred settler men, women, and children. At Oran in 1962, Algerian revolutionaries massacred French men, women, and children. Why should anyone expect Palestinians—or anyone else—to be different? To point these things out is not to justify them; it is to understand them. Every single one of these massacres was the result of decades or centuries of colonial violence and oppression, a structure of violence Frantz Fanon explained decades ago in The Wretched of the Earth.
What we are not allowed to say, in other words, is that if you want the violence to stop, you must stop the conditions that produced it. You must stop the hideous system of racial segregation, dispossession, occupation, and apartheid that has disfigured and tormented Palestine since 1948, consequent upon the violent project to transform a land that has always been home to many cultures, faiths, and languages into a state with a monolithic identity that requires the marginalization or outright removal of anyone who doesn’t fit. And that while what’s happening in Gaza today is a consequence of decades of settler-colonial violence and must be placed in the broader history of that violence to be understood, it has taken us to places to which the entire history of colonialism has never taken us before.
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Nearly three-quarters of people who own guns say they do so for protection and self-defense. So, what if there was a firearm that has the same “devastating stopping power” as a traditional gun, but “without the lethal consequences”? Turns out this already exists.
For The Trace, Ted Alcorn highlights Byrna, a manufacturer of less-lethal guns that launch plastic spheres, instead of metal bullets, that don’t pierce the skin. Other less-lethal weapons like tasers exist as well, but they’ve been marketed mainly to law enforcement; Byrna is the first weapons-maker of less-lethal devices to appeal to the general public.
But are these less-deadly weapons without risk?
To convince skeptical customers of the weapons’ deterrent effect, Ganz and his marking director volunteered their bodies as targets: with a camera running, another staff member shot each of them with a Byrna, then posted the videosonline. Upon taking a shot to the leg, Ganz swore and hopped in pain, later displaying a raised welt. Despite their efforts, Byrna finished the year with less than $1 million in sales.
Gradually, Byrna caught up with its sales. In August 2021 its weapons were available on Amazon, where ads read, “Designed to defend lives, not take them.” The marketing also leaned into the fact the devices aren’t regulated like guns: “No permits or background checks required and no waiting periods.”
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A detailed investigation into the ease of buying a “suicide kit” online and the forums that peddle them. Luc Rinaldi focuses on the case study of Kenneth Law—who built his business during the pandemic—and the people who have used his kits to die. A difficult read, but one that sheds light on a dark part of the web that needs awareness.
The first time Noelle said she was going to harm herself, her parents called the police in a panic. The hospital held her for 72 hours, which is standard practice for patients who arrive in a suicidal crisis. It would be the first stay of many. Over the next couple of years, Noelle returned to the psych ward every few months. Last January, not long after Noelle had moved a few hours away to attend college, Sara and David received a call from a hospital near her school. Their daughter had attempted suicide.
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What it’s like to be a child of war, a school-shooting support group for principals, a 1981 feature on rodeo queens, on becoming a woman in NYC in 1978, and the San Francisco donut shop that hasn’t closed in over 50 years.
Zarlasht Halaimzai | The Guardian | October 31, 2023 | 3,572 words
In the last few weeks, the Israel-Gaza war has amassed horrific statistics: the number of hostages, the number of refugees, the number of injuries, the number of deaths—and the number who were children. Yes, the number who were children. As Zarlasht Halaimzai states in this extraordinary, harrowing piece for The Guardian, “Children bear the brunt of war.” Writing of her personal experiences—of another war, at another time, with the same consequences—Halaimzai pulls us down from lofty statistics into the raw reality of being bombed, day after day. She was 10 years old when US-funded mujahideen bombarded her home city of Kabul. Ten years old when “bedtime, schooltime, playtime, and dinnertime all vanished.” Small things make her retelling incredibly powerful: How, after the rockets stopped, her granny would “produce a jar of honey and feed us children a spoonful, trying to wash the taste of terror out of our mouths.” How Halaimzai “couldn’t look at my little sister and my little brother because somehow, I felt ashamed that this was their childhood.” And how “The sound of a rocket hitting a solid object enters your body and lives there forever.” Sentences to pierce your psyche. This essay reminds us of the many conflicts that have come before; Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine—to name a few. It reminds us of the many children who have suffered. Of the many killed. The many to learn the same life lesson as Halaimzai: “that there are no monsters in the dark. Only adults who are terrified enough to kill.” If you want to restore your faith in humanity, this is not the piece for you. If you want to understand the humanity beneath the bombs, it is. —CW
Gloria Liu | Men’s Health | November 1, 2023 | 5,411 words
After reading Gloria Liu’s piece on the support group for principals whose schools have experienced gun violence, I realize that most news stories about school shootings cover the victims, the survivors, and the shooters. Rarely do I read pieces focused on the school leaders who are left to pick up the pieces; we expect such individuals to be strong and resilient enough to carry their communities through such traumatic events (or, in some cases, expect them to take the blame). Liu recounts the formation of Principal Recovery Network (PRN) in 2019, which has since grown to 21 members, including former and current principals of Columbine, Marjory Stoneman Douglas (Parkland), and Sandy Hook. After a school tragedy, PRN reaches out to the principal, offering advice and simply letting them know they’re not alone. You don’t even know what you need right now, one of them will say, but here’s my number—call anytime. The fact that this club needs to exist is heartbreaking. But it does. Through this outlet, these individuals have given each other emotional support and a much-needed space for self-care and healing. —CLR
E. Jean Carroll | Outside Magazine | April/May 1981 | 2,910 words
One of the week’s nicest surprises was Outside digging into its formidable archives to republish this 42-year-old E. Jean Carroll feature about that year’s Miss Rodeo America competition in Oklahoma City. New Journalism had been around for nearly two decades by the time the piece first came out, but Carroll’s vignette-first approach fits snugly into the form. (In a companion Outside interview about her career, Carroll cops freely to this: “There’s a lot of Joan Didion in that piece.”) The pleasure here is more cumulative than linear: you’re there to soak up Carroll’s scenework and side-eye as much as you are to learn anything about the actual competition, and the piece oozes with both. These rodeo queens are caught between impossible expectations—subjected to “cosmetic sessions” and paraded in front of the press in skimpy nightgowns, while also expected to deliver congenial speeches and display horsemanship. That Carroll captures all of this without a giant flashing neon sign is marvel enough; that she does so in vivid detail in her first published story makes clear that her trajectory was all but inevitable. It may clock in at fewer than 3,000 words, but like the very best magazine writing, it will stay with you well beyond the time it takes you to read it. —PR
Amy Margolis | The Iowa Review | Spring 2023 | 3,478 words
I love it when a personal essay can take me to a time and place I’ve never visited. Amy Margolis does just that in “1978,” for The Iowa Review. Enter, stage left, a young woman leaving Kansas City to become a dancer and make a home in New York City. Margolis, naive but ambitious, clad in leotards and Lee jeans, is going to live with a sister she barely knows who aspires to be an actress. In this essay though, the women are not the stars of the show. It’s the gay men in Amy’s life—Paul and Phillip—who steal it, as they befriend her and, in her own words, teach her “how to be a woman.” “Paul was long and lean and attenuated, like a dying note,” she writes. “It was the year my whole life started.” Paul and Phillip feed her, both literally and figuratively, give fashion advice, and teach her about sex. (Dear reader, fair warning: we are not in Kansas anymore.) Above all, the men model what it means to love oneself. “In New York, I am always afraid, but never with Paul and Philip. Paul and Philip are men, especially Philip. They’re towering figures both, and unabashed, and at home in their skin,” Margolis writes. With friends like these, indeed, there’s no place like home. —KS
Chris Colin | Alta Online | September 25, 2023 | 3,736 words
I did not expect a feature on an iconic restaurant to start out in a “small potato-farming village in the Arcadia region of Greece’s Peloponnese.” But then again, this—like many stories of the American dream—starts out somewhere else. For Alta Online, Chris Colin introduces us to proprietors George and Nina Giavris, but this profile focuses on the Silver Crest Donut Shop, a 24-hour diner they bought in 1970 that has been open every moment since, where the “new gal” has 30+ years on the job as a waitress. Time has stood still at the Silver Crest, and Colin lovingly documents the artifacts of the past that make up the diner’s interior. What’s a little more difficult to capture—and what Colin does best here—is highlight the intangible: the je ne sais quoi of the atmosphere that, along with George, Nina, and the Silver Crest, is the fourth character in this piece. “You could do worse than to age as the Silver Crest ages—no struggle, full acceptance,” writes Colin. “Once again, I find the Silver Crest a reprieve from something. Outside those doors, San Francisco teeters, democracy teeters, the ice caps teeter, sense itself teeters. . . . But here there’s no room for nonsense. You order your food, you eat your food.” With this piece, you might come for the food, but you’ll stay for the feeling. —KS
Audience Award
Here’s the piece our readers loved most this past week:
Erika Hayasaki | The Verge | October 25, 2023 | 7,751 words
When we think of the victims of stalking we don’t often think of college professors, but in this investigation, Erika Hayasaki discovers many concerning incidences involving student obsessions. Hayasaki concentrates on the distressing experience of three professors in Connecticut, and the online abuse they receive is nothing short of extraordinary. The psychological horror of social media bullying is ripped open in this well-reported piece. —CW
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Forty-two years ago, a young E. Jean Carroll entered the magazine world with this absolute barn-burner of a feature chronicling the annual Miss Rodeo America contest. A fitting debut for a legendary career.
A lot of people are dubious about these contests. The banner on the bosom, the high-heeled hobble, the ramble down the runway. But in a very particular way, this pageant can tell you something special about these women and the way they grew up, about what someone taught them once, about a certain way of life. I mean there are things here that can cloud the issue, and it can all make for a clash in styles. But you should remember that these rodeo queens have roared into the arenas of Ranger, Texas; Ringling, Oklahoma; Roundup, Montana; and Rifle, Colorado, on the foulest, greenest, dumbest, and rankest of horses, shot their salutes to the crowd, and raced out to standing ovations. I want you to remember that Miss Rodeo America 1980 laid a leg over 200 head of weirdo horses and ran the rail in 300 rodeo performances. “Ah, the arena is a little wet, ma’am,” they told her in Oregon. “The rain has made it a little slick. And that horse there don’t like to see his reflection in no mud puddle. Makes him hoppy.”
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The Guardian has put a content warning on this piece—for its graphic depictions of war—and it’s not something to be read lightly. It paints a vivid picture of a child’s suffering in a previous conflict and heightens our awareness of those who are currently living under a barrage of bombs. It’s chilling, it’s powerful, it’s important.
The simmering fear of violence that we had felt every day now turned into terror. Kabul was shelled relentlessly for months. Food and water became scarce. Each day, we received news of more deaths among our family, friends and neighbours. I lived in an extended family of several uncles and aunts and my granny, and it became our family ritual to pray for the dead before eating supper. My grandmother would lead the prayers. My four little siblings and I would follow, scared and confused by death. My heavily pregnant aunt looked numb, all expression drained from her, as if she needed reminding to move her arm and her hand to reach the food on the plate in front of her.
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